Hope is not a feeling that comes and goes with external circumstances. Hope is who we are independent of outcomes. Hope is as basic to humans as compassion and intelligence. It is always present, it never leaves us. It is not dependent on success and not afflicted by failure. Thus, it is free from fear. And without fear, we can see clearly. We see what our work is, we have the strength to persevere, we do what we feel is right work and, as poet T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘the rest is not our business.’

Richard Rohr:

Love, which is nothing more than endless life, is luring us forward, because love is what we also and already are and we are drawn to the fullness of our own being.

Judy Cannato:

…life emerges from what physicist David Bohm called the quantum vacuum. Bohm said, ‘There is one energy that is the basis of all reality.’ According to Bohm, the quantum vacuum is the fundamental underlying reality of which everything int he universe is an expression—everything—including ourselves…Emerging from the single quantum vacuum, it seems that we remain connected throughout our lives, bound together by a mysterious energy that makes all creation a single whole…Our exploration together is concerned with living with the awareness of our connectedness and making choices that are life-giving for all.

Jeannie Martin:

Can we also, in this modern culture, accept and welcome all living things with reverence and gratitude? We might, for example, spend time looking at the stars, or one star, and breathing in the peace and quiet of a winter night. We might wonder at the magnitude of the Milky Way and what might be beyond our universe. It is easy with all of our machinery to miss this wonder, but Nature is always pressing in, reminding us of who we are in the family of creation.

somewhere
in the Milky Way
first starlight

Caspar Henderson:

Not many living things leave a beautiful corpse. Among those that do are the ancient oak trees still found in a few pockets of woodland in the British isles, and the Nautilus, a distant cousin of squid and octopus that lives in tropical waters. In the case of an old oak, the folds and twists in its trunk and boughs continue to express, suspended as in a sculpture, forces that shaped the tree during its five hundred years of life. Int he case of the Nautilus, the animal that accreted the shell had a relatively brief existence, typically less than ten years, but what remains — in cross section a logarithmic spiral — manifests perfect symmetry. The oak is a like a massive, turbulent musical score; the Nautilus shell is like a chord resolved.